


We Must Now Learn to Touch The Sky

by Jinnism



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2015-05-29
Packaged: 2018-04-01 19:51:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4032502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jinnism/pseuds/Jinnism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’ve got nowhere else to be,” Eggsy says, and it’s the most honest thing he’s admitted to in a while.</p><p>Harry Hart only presses his hand to the mirror and does some weird high-tech shit.</p><p>( Or wherein Eggsy is five, eleven, twenty, twenty-three and suddenly a Kingsman.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Must Now Learn to Touch The Sky

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry, I would say this is overkill on the angst but then it would be ooc even for me.  
> Eggsy's backstory was a relentless seed waiting to grow and the last nail in the coffin was something about his height in tumblr before I cracked and gave in to writing this.

 

When Eggsy’s five he ends up cultivating this terrible crush on his kindergarten maths teacher. She’d taught them how to count, patient and coaxing, adding with their fingers, and he’d been the first to get the sum of all the apples right. Eggsy remembers her “Well done, Eggsy,” and the candy she’d treated him to, remembers how he’d never tasted something so sweet and so flavourful in his entire life.

 

* * *

 

He’s eleven now, all elbows and bones and skin, mum working 3 shifts at three different diners every day and bringing him along because their neighbourhood hadn’t been the safest place to live in. He takes orders from strangers in his threadbare star-wars t-shirt and jeans, and balances plates on his hands and arms, helps mum with clean-up on nights when it’s her turn.

He’s also eleven, nursing scraped shins and bruised knees, and trying his best not to let mum know about the way some kid had shoved him out of his chair that morning, broke one of his two only pencils and stood there with the whole class laughing.

None of it compares however, to when he wins the districts championship, grinning wildly around the gold medal, heavy in his hands and sturdy beneath his teeth, into flashing lights and the wide-eyed, awed crowd.

 

* * *

 

He’s fifteen and he falls in love for the first time. His name is Josh, he wears a cap, has a smattering of freckles over his cheeks and Eggsy blushes every time Josh walks past. Josh is also six years older and a kid living down his block and is only here one summer before he’s gone. Josh has red hair, plays a guitar, and goes to college. No one tells him that loving blokes is wrong, and when mum catches him looking utterly besotted at Josh – the kid who has glasses, calls her Mrs. Unwin and starts a fight in one of the diners she works at – Michelle cups Eggsy’s cheek in her hand and smiles, always tiredly, and says nothing.

 

* * *

 

He’s sixteen and limber; promising, olympics team material – but that was six years ago - glaring at the sun with bitter, angry tears, trying hard to quell the disappointment rising in his chest from being dropped from the school team.

His knuckles are still red, pain sparking through his fingers from when he’d punched the rich kid in school. The kid who got in simply by merit of wealth, who stole his place - hard-earned and hard-won, nights by the playground two blocks down practicing on the monkey bars, days trying to concentrate in class with his eyelids slipping shut.

Eggsy doesn’t go home straight. He lingers in the park until its dark - stays until his eyes are rubbed dry and irritated, until his fingers curled around the rusting iron of screeching swing chains are numb and bloodless from the cold, until the hurt in his chest has dulled down to an ache.

Mum’d waited for him that night, worried sick, and Eggsy will always remember the moment he’d looked up and into mum’s eyes, tired and sad and soft with disappointment, had found himself getting angry all over again, thinking _i’ll show them._

 

* * *

The next summer, on the day dad died, Eggsy registers for the marines, doesn’t tell mum, doesn’t tell Dean – Dean who’d just showed up at their doorstep with a packet of crisps and a train set looking like that’d been enough to buy Eggsy’s affection - just up and leaves, cause they ain’t gonna notice him gone innit, with mum looking at Dean like he’s the best thing that’s ever happened to her since dad died and Dean’s always drunk, always on the couch with the tele on, always snogging mum-

Then he’s eighteen, nineteen, twenty and ignoring the calls from home - every morning staring up at his drill instructor with bleary eyes, stretched thin by exhaustion and just so, so, so _bloody angry_ -

The call comes in one morning when his arms are sore from all the push-ups he’s merited as punishment. He'd helped the new kid, all flailing limbs and not nearly there yet from killing himself trying as they made it down the wall halfway through the obstacle course. So of course Eggsy’s in a furious, pitch black mood-

Mum’s pregnant and it’s Dean’s and-

 _come back, Eggsy, I can’t lose you, can’t lose you like I did your dad, can’t face that again_ \- and _alright, alright_ mum-

 

* * *

 

He’s twenty and three months to twenty-one when he drops out of the marine. Mum hugs him when he stands in the doorway in his t-shirt and jeans, though her wrists are thinner and her complexion paler. Dean only snarls at him from the couch and says caustic, “Well, look who’s back. The little shit’s finally done gallivanting around-“

He never gets to finish because Eggsy throws the first punch then, and it’s not hard, not exactly, for the second, _third, fourth_ \- Until Dean’s down on the floor and mum’s screaming and Eggsy’s wrestling with a man twice his fucking weight-

Mum drags him off before he kills the man, rage skittering beneath his skin, loud and uncontained and he wants to murder him, wants to shout _fuck you it’s all your fault, all your fucking fault_ -

Dean uses that window of opportunity to get up and onto his feet, thunderous. And promptly gives Eggsy a nasty backhand which makes his head dizzy and his vision swim.

 

* * *

 

He’s twenty one and he spends the next three years of his life trying to make do, earn his keep, scrape together whatever money he can earn, takes whatever opportunities he gets to make a quick quid - suck a cock, an extra shift here, a quick fuck there, helps Mrs Waverly across the street paint her house and rescue her ten cats from ten trees – whatever necessary.

Spends his twenty-first birthday looking up and behind his back for police while trying to hotwire a car, spends the next day looking up and into dean’s face and wanting to hit him but can’t, not again, spends the rest of his weeks learning to keep his chin up high, grits his teeth hard and down and says nothing, even when he’s been implied _rentboy, slut, thief-_

 

* * *

He’s twenty three when he pickpockets the car keys, tell his friends to get the fuck out, takes a moment to think as he’s staring down a police car, and figures _why the fuck not_ – steps on the accelerator and crashes some arsehole’s car straight into another.

And it’s like his mind has dissociated into two parts, the greater one looking on unbothered while the cops haul him out cursing and the other a little hysterical voice floating somewhere in the back of his head. It is almost textbook then as a man reads him his rights where he’s handcuffed and pressed belly down on the hood of the wrecked and ruined car, and all Eggsy does think about, can think about - is where his mates managed to fuck off to.

It’s only when he gets told he’s going to jail for real that reality comes snapping back, like a rubber back drawn so taut before it’s released, sharp and stinging and dreading, and that tiny voice pipes up, crowding his heart into an unescapable corner-

He doesn’t know where he’s going with when he asks for a last phone call, but then he’s pulling out the medallion he’s kept on a whim all these years past, the only thing he remembers about it is a man in a suit saying ‘oxfords not brogues’, and then his trembling fingers have dialled the number and he doesn’t know what the fuck it means by  _your complain has been received,_  all that shite. Has resigned to spending his ass in jail-

It comes as a surprise then that he’s released without bail, no fuckin’ fine, nothing, not even a reprimand. Just a surly, grumpy inspector saying to him “You’re free to go.” like the words are rotten, curdled milk in his mouth.

“Who are _you_?” Eggsy asks the man with long-as-fuck legs, who’s standing there with his umbrella and tortoise-shell glasses looking like he’d belong in a GQ magazine spread, like he’d belong anywhere else than here, looking invincible and Eggsy, twenty three and nowhere to go and not yet finished with bad decisions, ends back up in the pub where the arsehole who he’d stolen a car from frequents and that's just mortifying  _innit._

It pans out exactly nowhere near what he expects. Eggsy ends up spectator to the most exhilarating fight he’s seen in his life – heat pooling in his gut and very nearly breathless, simply by _watching_ \-  and ends up, of all things, getting an offer to some noble shit by the end of it.

“I’ve got nowhere else to be,” Eggsy says, and it’s the most honest thing he’s admitted to in a while.

Harry Hart only presses his hand to the mirror and does some weird high-tech shit.

 

* * *

 

Eggsy spends the best six months of his twenty-three years from there on staring up into the face of a man so brilliant, he feels like he’s staring up into the sun - too bright, too burning, too much and too warm he needs to shade his eyes, wants to, in the face of something so great, someone so untouchable.

He spends days sparring with Roxy while not on missions, and nights slipping into Harry Hart’s ward in the medical wing with JB by his heels, making fond acquaintances with the sound of his mentor’s heartbeat and the plastic chair that’s sure to kill his back. He talks about how much Roxy’s a luv and the rest of them are posh bastards, and hopes and hopes and _hopes_ for Harry to wake, says “You’re supposed to be my mentor,” and “Now you’re just bein’ a mite stubborn,” and the day before the fuckin parachute out of a plane mission, Eggsy, exhausted and running on maybe less than five percent brain capacity says, “Harry, _please_ ,” - pleading and begging like he’s never done before.

Merlin finds him there the next morning during his routine checks, slumped by Harry’s bedside, and mercifully, doesn’t kick him out.

 

* * *

 

Harry Hart gets shot in Kentucky, alone and disappointed in Eggsy, and Eggsy realises, then, there, that for whatever loss he’s known, this is _much worse_ , much more than a bloody bleeding wound that will never heal, much more than a life snuffed out, much more than all those lives he’s just witnessed die- that this loss, Harry Hart’s death, is a loss to the world – and yet –

When Eggsy shuts the laptop with shaky hands and looks around, all he does see, all he can see -  is the legacy of someone who’d looked at Eggsy with unwarranted kindness even when he was a stranger, someone who’d been so, so generous with his chances, had gambled it on a kid who’s only spent his entire life running, when he could have chosen so many others-

The alcohol, when Eggsy downs it in one long gulp – too impatient to do anything like _savour_ \- burns a painful line as it goes down his throat and Eggsy, numb and shaking and furious, pinpricks of heat blooming behind his eyes and maybe a little _heartbroken_ , thinks to himself, good, _good-_

 

* * *

 

 _"I'd rather be with Harry"_ He says, leaning back to watch the moment Arthur chokes on his own poison. The fuckin tool.

He figures he'd let the statement speak for itself.

 

* * *

 

He’s twenty three and he’s just saved the world. Has killed the madman with a lisp who calls himself Valentine and the chick with blades for legs without so much a thought spared for the lives he's taken. Eggsy waits for the other shoe to drop and yet, by the end of it, he feels no remorse, no sparking guilt in his chest, nothing but a dull ache of satisfaction and the burn of excess energy, which eventually carries him into Princess Tilde’s room and into her bed, not entirely there throughout.

_Harry would be proud of you, Eggsy._

And Eggsy, while he’s lying beside the princess catching his breath, the hitch in it nothing to do with whatever nasty live porn show he’s just given Merlin, thinks quietly and soft and hopeful:

_yeah_

* * *

 

Eggsy ends up spending the rest of his days as Galahad.

“You’re one of us now,” Merlin’d said. And Eggsy had laughed, a little delirious with happiness, worried for a moment there that he'd end up being sent home. “Even with me not shooting the dog?”

“Yes, Eggsy,” Merlin had said, almost smiling, “Even then.”

 

* * *

  
  
He spends twenty- _four_ mostly staring into death and laughing in its face and peering into a life he’s never seen before; suits and guns and blood alongside occasionally saving the world-

Sees from afar what Merlin and Roxy cannot see yet, sees what they’re too scared to say to each other, tiptoeing and dancing around in each other’s spaces, hesitant where they shouldn’t be, _especially_ when this job allows none. Something sharp and tender and subtle brewing.

He’s in the desert and has been driving long enough that sand has winded its way into the cracks between his toes and into his mouth, dusting the leather seats. Eggsy finds himself thumbing the signet ring, a hand on the wheel, its familiar weight on his right pinky. And for a moment, with dunes and dunes of shifting orange fucking sand spread out on either side of him, nowhere else to go, allows himself a brief thought of _what ifs._

 

* * *

 

He’s twenty-five and has been running the show as Galahad for two years, and Harry Hart’s mentee for an extra six months, and in the last twenty four months, he’s learned enough to know what being Kingsman entails, learns most of all, that Kingsmen are made. Not born.

He's defused bombs on the go, "Merlin, which wire do I cut?" 'Oy, Merlin, answer me-" 

Learned about the infamous honeypot missions and - carried out of necessity - remembers cursing, "Fuckin hell, Merlin. This guy's _old._ " loudly the first time as if it would have expelled whatever lingering apprehension he had. When it didn't, had gone to get glitz up for whatever mark he'd needed to seduce.

Has dismantled governments and shot planes out of the sky, has done the customary car chase in all the Bond films he'd watched as a kid and crashed all the cars he's needed, and Eggsy, while he’s two years older than the day he'd picked up a pair of tortoise shell glasses and put them on in the back of a plane - Eggsy for the first time in forever, has less regrets than he’s ever gotten around to having.

He’s not any less angry, and he’s not anymore apologetic, but it’s in these times when the nightmares are at large and the days are gloomy, when he’s hung up by his ankles and bleeding out and wondering if he’s ever going to see another day-  He remembers Harry’s word said in surety, universal truths and pockets of gold, and thinks instead about life, thinks about _repayment_ , thinks about mum and Daisy and the people he has now, thinks instead about how desperate he wants to _live_ \- and learns to do that, learns to claw his way out of whatever hell hole and whatever cesspit and whatever shitty town he’s in, single-minded and unbroken and always, _always_ comes home.

 

* * *

 

He’s twenty-six, a little bruised, skin littered with a myriad of new scars, and he should feel older, should feel more disillusioned or fuckin’ bitter, but instead, Eggsy feels young, like he’s finally just got to steady ground beneath his feet, ready and excited and dizzy with the need to go out there, test his limits, shatter his boundaries.

It’s a Tuesday, and Eggsy has his head tilted to the boneless sky, eyes closed and feeling calm - peaceful where he’s seated beside an empty grave and a plain tombstone.

 _Harry-fuckin-hart_ , he thinks almost fondly and when it comes, accepts the relentless feeling that’s dug at his ribs ever since Kentucky. The one that’s snapped at his heels and chased him through all the continents and back here fighting. The one that has tethered him to Kingsman and Merlin and Roxy. The one that’s grown and grown and grown and is now part of who Eggsy is – spurred on by an unending act of loyalty to his mentor, a way of respect to a dead man’s legacy.

The sunlight is scalding on his face, the breeze damp and tangling in his hair, and there are fresh tears drying on his face- and all Eggsy can think about is how _weightless_ , how _free_ he feels in this instance. A bird in flight. The thought makes him let loose a laugh, the first he’s had in ages without the rush of danger flooding his veins.

When he does eventually open his eyes, the blue sky has yet to move, is still there, and Eggsy, twenty-six with his entire life laid out in front of him, can think of no place else he’s rather be, no other circle of people Eggsy’d rather spend the rest of his days kicking arse with. And for the first time yet again, he thinks he can finally see a _tomorrow_ , and reckons, if he squints hard enough, he’ll find a hint of  _good_  on waiting on the horizon just yet.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr : [jinnism](http://www.jinnism.tumblr.com)


End file.
